I go back and forth in my heart about the death penalty. Emotionally I'm all for it but intellectually I'm not. Or vice-versa. The only thing I can resolve, that would argue strongly for life in prison without the possibility of parole, is that we might eventually learn something from the prisoner.I think I was in the second grade when President Kennedy was assassinated. We got a day off from school, which impressed upon me that it was a really important thing. We watched the scene of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot over and over and over on the evening news. It didn't look as staged then as it does now. Lights, camera, cue Jack Ruby, ACTION!
With Oswald out of the way the government could weave any kind of story it wanted to obfuscate the underlying realities of what most historians now surmise was a government-sponsored mafia hit. Or a mafia-sponsored government hit, whatever. Conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination have been a cottage industry since the Warren Commission's report and one result is a library of books on the subject. If Oswald had lived a life in prison we could have saved some trees.
Meanwhile, John Kennedy Jr., a self-professed and Mommy financed political journalist has never, to my knowledge, offered his own thoughts on his father's death. Maybe he's smarter than people think.
James Earl Ray is near death behind prison walls. He has recanted his confession of killing Dr. Martin Luther King 30 years ago Even King's widow agreed that Ray should be given an opportunity to go on record with his side of the story. We may find out that James Earl was just a dumb-ass that got played by some smooth operators. Knowledge we wouldn't have if we had executed him years ago.
Timothy McVeigh, having just been found guilty by a Denver, Colorado jury, may be the country's next Oswald. He seems like the kind of guy who will go to his death (natural or state-imposed) with his lips sealed. After all, he did it to prove a point: that the government has turned against the people it's supposed to serve. What better way to prove that notion than to be martyred by that same government?
If they take McVeigh out with a lethal injection, we may never know the scope of his operation and actions. He may have been a single, lost soul with misplaced passions and little brains to go along with them. . . or he may be part of a sinister cell of militia fanatics planning similar actions in the future. Is the satisfaction of revenge worth the value of the information and understanding we may gain from the man years down the road if kept alive? I don't know, but James Earl Ray has an opinion.
In the spirit of this piece I would like you to know that I'm cheating. I saw an article about this subject on the front page of The New York Times and copped the idea.
Thinking back, I don't remember cheating at all in elementary school. I still believed in heaven and hell and didn't want to screw up my fate. By high school I had figured out that heaven was in your mind and hell was having to go to high school every day.
Cliff Notes, the yellow and black pamphlet versions of the classics, were sometimes a necessity for me. Without some kind of vast oversimplification I couldn't make much sense of Ivanhoe in seventh grade.
I'm sure the publishers of Cliff Notes would react in horror--shock even, if they thought their pamphlets were being used by students to avoid actually reading the great work itself. (Uh huh.)
These days, outright cheating is much easier thanks to the web. Term papers on a wide range of subjects are available for download. You can pay upwards of ten bucks a page or you might luck out and find one that fits your need for free. Some of these sites suggest the use of the material only as "research aids." Other sites call a spade a spade pretty much presupposing the file will simply be printed out and handed in as the downloader's work.
One obvious solution is sit-down tests where papers are composed in person, in real time and long-hand. Or we may have to change our view of knowledge gathering to include answering the question by any means necessary. I remember seeing kids go to such great lengths to figure out a cheating scheme that the same amount of effort actually studying the material would have resulted in a satisfactory grade. And a much better feeling of self-worth one would imagine.
I don't necessarily like the pizza the big chains crank out so I order from the local mom & pop shops. Last Thursday I had an unpleasant pizza experience. I called the small restaurant nearby (that xeroxes its menus which I found quaint), ordered my pie and realized the fellow on the other end of the phone was ready to hang up before getting my address. I asked him if he had my street number on some kind of phone display or something and he said, "No, uh . . . spaced . . . good call man." I told him where I lived and expected trouble.
It was almost an hour and a half after that first call that I figured I had better double check. I called the pie emporium and was reassured my order was definitely on its way. Ten minutes later I was standing out at the end of my driveway in my pajamas thinking the poor guy just couldn't find my house when a harried man in a disheveled mini-truck lurched to a stop at my slippers.
He handed me a pizza and apologized for the delay. Turns out he was the owner of the establishment. His young manager decided not to come in today and two drivers quit without notice. I felt sorry for him. He must have sensed it. I was his last delivery of the day and he certainly unloaded his troubles on me.
Kids today have no grounding in moral responsibility and consider dedication to a job "selling out," he moaned. (This is not good, I thought, as my rapidly cooling pizza's cheese continued to coagulate.)
At the same time as letting my 14" artichoke heart pesto pie grow cold, I felt a deep compassion for this man. The lone small business owner trying to make a go of it with the dregs of a generation who feel they shouldn't have to hold down a bogus job to be able to party, man. (Bogus is all you get if bogus is all you can do, boy.)
Without some respect for a serious work ethic, kids today can look forward to a lifetime of jobs with paper hats. And that ain't no party, dude.
Robert Jordan wanted to be a police officer in his home town of New London, Connecticut. He sells insurance, works as a part-time security guard, holds a bachelor's degree in literature and has one year of law school under his belt. Jordan took the qualifying exam for the New London Police Department and was surprised to be told he was unacceptable. He was even more surprised to find out why. Jordan was told he is too smart to be a policeman.
Seems the New London Police Department uses a test developed by Wonderlic Personnel Test Inc. The average score deemed acceptable is somewhere around 21 or 22 points on their scale. Jordan scored 33. He topped out. The New London officials feel that if someone is "too smart" for a position they may become bored and leave, after expensive training. (At least that's their official line.)
Baloney. Superiors don't want to hire anyone nearly as smart as they are (or, god forbid, smarter) thus eliminating any credible scrutiny from below. What's wrong with smart policemen? Dumb bosses, apparently.
Millions of people are subjected to intelligence tests for various reasons annually. How are the test subjects supposed to know when they'd be better off blowing it? Why wouldn't every employer want and seek out the most intelligent applicant?
Mr. Jordan, denied a chance to be a law enforcement office has taken this bizarre case to a higher court. He's filed a federal lawsuit saying that he's been discriminated against because he's too smart. Unbelievable.
What is The New London Police Department afraid of? Robert Jordan might just think of a better way to do police work. Or he might just recognize ineptitude at the top. Red lining intelligent people out of public service is an concept beyond outrageous. Let's hope Mr. Jordan's case comes down hard on his side. The smart side.
God forbid Chelsea Clinton ever has to bring a sexual harrassment suit against an employer. She won't be able to look to her father for much help.
It took an incredibly insulting (and stupid) comment from one of President William Jefferson Clinton's personal lawyers to finally shake the tree of feminist leaders. It's about time, (but a little late ladies).
A couple of weekends ago on NBC's news program "Meet The Press" Robert S. Bennett, the President's counsel on Bimbo Eruptions, stated that if Paula Corbin Jones persists with her sexual harrassment suit against The First Bubba, then the defense strategy would be to be to investigate and reveal all the gory, sordid details they could find relating to Ms. Jones' sexual history.
If this was simply a small-town Arkansas case, one could write it off as old-fashioned red-necked good-ol'-boy behavior. Coming from the counsel for the chief law enforcement officer of the United States however, the approach is a bit more ominous. Using the awesome power of the country's highest office to intimidate one individual woman is a new low in an administration that distinguishes itself by setting new lows. Lower than Clinton's hitman James Carville mentioning something about dragging a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park in reference to Ms. Jones. (Nice, boys, real nice.)
I thought the tactic of threatening to expose minute details about an accuser's sexual past had pretty much been phased out. The approach is as repugnant as it is passe.' Mr. Clinton is desperate to fend off Jones' case, especially since his attempt to postpone it was refuted unanimously by The Supreme Court--some members of which he personally selected. Hey Bill, settle already.
Less than a week after chewing his shoe on national television, Robert Bennett served himself a piece of crow and issued a complete about-face statement muttering something about how Jones' sexual history is now suddenly "irrelevant." Wow. What a difference a few days can make.
Clinton has enjoyed the support of the feminists, radical and otherwise, under the guise of his supposed support of "women's issues." These feminists are certainly willing to look the other way at times. They continue to defend a man who admittedly cheated on his wife and allegedly continues to do so. (Wild Bill might want to feel more than your pain, ladies.)
Breaking her stony silence on the issue, Patricia Ireland of The National Organization for Women finally said: "Women who file sexual-harrassment complaints should not face personal attacks designed to intimidate them into silence." It's nice to have Ms. Ireland finally on the record in this case. It sure took long enough.
Remember, these are the folks who elevated Anita Hill to saintdom when a Republican Clarence Thomas was being accused of far lesser harrassment yet remained hidden in the shadows when it came to the escapades of our Democrat president.
As First Daughter Chelsea heads for Stanford University to begin her freshman year I wonder what her opinion of her father's repeated denials of sexual impropriety could be?